Who is Kim Siever?

Last week was like Christmas in my office. I received an iMac and Windows XP.

For those who might be thinking, “How did he get XP on an iMac”, I am talking about two different machines.

The Faculty of Management bought a bunch of IBMs this year and I received one of them. They came with windows XP. I have been waiting for awhile to be able to use this OS and I am very impressed.

For my double pleasure it also came with Office 2003. There are not too many changes in most of the Office suite apps; although I do like the new Reading View in Microsoft Word. The most impressive changes were in Outlook. The Reading Pane and the collapsible menus are a hit with me. I only wish I can make my IMAP folder the default inbox. That would make my job a lot easier.

A member of our faculty, for whatever reason, decided to bring back his iMac. Since it is still fairly new, our department didn’t want to get rid of it. At the same time they didn’t want to have to provide support for a single Mac. It was decided that I would get it and I could take care of myself.

It was set up on Friday, and I am pretty stoked about it. Despite what Jon thinks, it’s not because I have converted to a Mac. It is because I get to test my sites on more platform/browser combinations. As well, it allows me to keep my Mac skills up to date.

A pleasant week as far as technology gifts go.

If there is one thing you should do first when implementing a new website design, it should be declaring your background colour. If you do anything else first, stop it. Declare your background colour first.

As I mentioned at Roger Johansson’s website, the mistake that website developers make the most often and that I find the most annoying is failing to declare a background colour.

It is not that I am so naïve as to not know why so many designers make this simple error. In fact, I know exactly why so many do it.

The first clue to knowing why the mistake is made is realising that the majority of website designs out there use white as a background colour. The second clue is realising that most browsers have white as the default background colour. What this means then is that when a designer fails to declare the white background colour for the website but then previews it in the browser, s/he will still see the intended white background and not realise there is no background colour declared.

This type of practice is risky for two reasons. The first reason is that it makes the designer rely too much on what s/he sees in his/her own browser and less on ensuring the code they use is valid (in the generic sense of the word). The second reason is that it gives the impression that the designer is not devoted to checking the site on other systems not like his/her own.

Please, pull up your socks and do better. At the very least, change your browser’s default background colour to something other than white.

For your voyeuristic viewing pleasure, here are some of the guilty parties. Please change your browser’s default background colour to view to something other than white. Neon green will exemplify the design laziness.

• www.yahoo.com
• www.athens2004.com
• www.lethbridge.ca
• www.nycvisit.com
• www.ahop2.com
• www.transcanada.com
• www.spreadfirefox.com
• www.translink.bc.ca

A co-worker asked me to make some changes to a section of the website today. Part of the changes included some paragraphs with sentences that were in bold and italics. Why do people do this? Why is it when someone wants to emphasise something, they over-emphasise it?

If you want to emphasise something, start by italicising it.

Suppose we have the following copy paragraph:

Kim has to go to Vancouver at the end of June for some training in ColdFusion. He will be gone five days, which will be the longest he has ever been away from the rest of the family.

Now suppose we want to emphasis to the reader how this trip will be the longest time Kim would be away from his family. In this case, we would format it as follows:

Kim has to go to Vancouver at the end of June for some training in ColdFusion. He will be gone five days, which will be the longest he has ever been away from the rest of the family.

This tells the user what part of the sentence that is not only the most important to the writer but that but that is also the part the writer wants to emphasise to the reader.

Consider the following:

Kim has to go to Vancouver at the end of June for some training in ColdFusion. He will be gone five days, which will be the longest he has ever been away from the rest of the family.

Notice the same words are italicised as before; they are still important. We also we have some words in bold. These are not just any random words, however; they have a relationship to the italicised words. They qualify just how long ‘longest’ is. In other words, despite the different levels of emphasis, the emphasis is still logical.

Watch what happens when we present emphasis as my co-worker asked me to do.

Kim has to go to Vancouver at the end of June for some training in ColdFusion. He will be gone five days, which will be the longest he has ever been away from the rest of the family.

The logic of the emphasis is completely lost and the whole point of using emphasis is muted. There is no indication whether the writer is emphasising being away from his family, the length he will be away or the act of being away.

When using emphasis, please make sure that it is logical and that it makes sense. Remember that using too much emphasis will have the opposite effect.

I have been working my legs too hard over the last couple of weeks with my non-stop cycling. Last weekend certainly was not enough time to let me legs recuperate. I decided to drive to work this morning in hopes that a third day will be enough to get my legs back to normal.

Anyhow, while walking from my truck to the University of Lethbridge on one of the new paths, I was reflecting on how the path has a lot to do with web design.

Before the fall of 2002, students travelling to the University of Lethbridge from the corner of University Drive and Columbia Boulevard had two choices to get to the University. They could travel down Valley Drive and then turn at the West Lot, travelling across the West Lot until they got to Anderson Hall or the PE Building. This was the longer option. The second option was to cut across the field, over the berm and across the Far west Lot and West Lot. This was the shorter option—albeit muddier in the winter and when it rained.

In 2002, the University of Lethbridge decided to pave the path students had worn down across the field and over the berm. They also added lighting. This made sense. After all, why not create a paved, lighted path right where people will use it?

As I reflected on this, it caused me to wonder why so many people do not do this when setting up information architecture on a website. So many websites make it very hard to find things. I do not know what the developers were thinking when they put it together, but I do know what they were not thinking. They were not thinking about the value in holding focus groups and watching how visitors use the website and what paths they try to access information.

So many developer think, “Oh, this looks cool” or “This looks good to me”, and give no thought that it needs to be cool and work; it needs to look good to you and everyone else.

If there is one thing website developers need to get into their thick, obtuse, close-minded heads, it is this: websites need to work for your users more than they need to work for you.

I am not a webmaster. I am not. I am not. I am not.

Is it clear now?

I design websites professionally. Website development is what puts food into the bellies of my children. It is what keeps the rain and snow off our beds. It is what puts new clothes on my wife’s body when she loses ten dress sizes. It is my bread and butter.

As a new media professional, I want a moniker that esteems professionalism and reflects my work over the past seven years. At the very least, I want a title that does not instigate laughter, derision and disrespect.

“Webmaster” is the epitome of what I do not want. It invokes images of high school juniors in a basement pushing out 25$ FrontPage websites. It gives the business world the impression that I started web design just yesterday. It is amateurish, unprofessional and “frankly” idiotic.

So, stop calling me it. I am not a webmaster. I am not a web guru. I am not the “web guy” at the Faculty of Management.

“Website Developer” seems to do the job for now.

Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 2 yesterday. Part of the service pack includes updates to Internet Explorer.

On the plus side, IE now comes with a native pop-up blocker. It also requires user authentication for drive-by downloads. Another cool feature is the “Add-On Manger”, which is similar to Firefox’s extensions manager.

On the minus side, these improvements are only for Windows XP users. As well, there appears to be no change in its level of compliance with web standards. Of course, there is still no tabbed browsing.

The changes are welcome, but I do not know why IE is so intent on letting the competition slowly gain market share. Microsoft seems unusually content in its current market share of the web browser market, but its failure at innovation and adoption of web standards and consumer-drive conventions is causing a slow but steady exodus to better products.

I will stick with Firefox at home.

My boss came into my office yesterday with a special gift. It was something I’ve been wanting for a very long time (okay only since this past March).

It was Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cedarholm. I’ve been following Dan’s blog ever since I came across a few of his articles on ALA (Mountaintop Corners and Faux Columns). He always has some quick and slick CSS tricks that I enjoy testing and even implementing.

When I first came across his blog, the thing that really drew me was the SimpleQuiz. It consisted of over 15 questions regarding how to code a specific element (such as a list of chocolate bars or breadcrumb navigation) in HTML. Each question was comprised of four suggestions and then he would ask his readers which of the four solutions they would pick. After each question received a significant number of questions, he’d post the findings.

It’s a very useful resource for knowing what the semantic method for coding specific elements.

The nice thing is that his book is set up the same way. At least what I have read so far seems to be. However, even better than this is that after each “quiz” in the book, Dan provides extra credit pages related to the answer. For example, for the list question, he provides a number of different techniques (such as Mini-Tab Shapes) to stylise a list.

I am not at all disappointed that my boss decided to let me have it. It is an amazing resource.

Now if I can just convince him to let me have Defensive Design for the Web by 37signals.

I downloaded Firefox two days ago. What a cool browser.

I ditched Internet Explorer at home a few moths ago for Netscape. Every time I opened IE for the first time, it would take nearly a minute to load the first page. That was simply unacceptable and since I could not find the problem, I simply switched to another browser.

While I was using Netscape, I became addicted to tabbed browsing. It has come to the point where I detest using IE at work because I always have to open new windows instead of new tabs. There were some other cool features as well.

I heard a lot about Firefox and decided to try it. It was a nice download; less than a minute on DSL. It automatically imported my Netscape bookmarks, favourites, links and passwords. Very cool.

After I installed it, I checked out all the extensions that were available. Wowee. What a find. Now, not only do I have tabbed browsing, but I have the following:

• Tabbed browsing manager
• Drag and drop tabs to the order you want
• Undo closed tabs
• Target=”_blank” links open in new tab
• URLs typed in address bar open in new tab
• Links clicked on from email or IM open in new tab

Some other cool features include GMail notification, spell check (similar to IESpell), web developer toolbar, auto search by typing words, view source for a selection of text, mailto links open in the e-mail application I indicated as my system’s default application. The list goes on.

I am never going to another browser.